Visit the Boxee+ website for the step-by-step instructions, and then read on for a few helpful hints from yours truly. However, know going in that installing Boxee+ will most definitely void your warranty, and there’s always a chance it will brick your Boxee Box, so it’s not for the faint of heart. How does one go about installing Boxee+ on a Boxee Box?įrom the usability standpoint, installing Boxee+ is pretty simple. In fact, there is already a new project called Boxee+, which I installed on one of our two boxes last week.īoxee+ aims to add new and improved features to the Boxee Box, including custom fan art for TV & Movies, plus a Music section on the Home screen which pulls music files from your home network (this was actually part of the old Boxee Box UI, but it disappeared in an early update.)īoxee+ also boasts faster HD streaming and a faster UI (more on that in a bit), plus some changes under the hood including telnet root access (for the non-geeks in the audience, root access is basically like a back door into the kitchen –- you can get in there and mess around with low-level stuff, such as running custom apps and even completely replacing the operating system, depending on the device.) Boxee+ also includes FTP access, so you can add remote file shares.Īnd like the original Boxee Box software, and XMBC before it, Boxee+ is open source - so developers can take the existing code and modify it for other projects (this is known as “forking” – for example, Boxee is a fork of the open-source entertainment hub XMBC.) And naturally, there are plenty of developers/hackers to be found in the community of Boxee enthusiasts. So even though Boxee is no longer supporting the Boxee Box, developers can still write new software for it. We’ll give a detailed review of Boxee TV in a separate post, but suffice it to say that while it is a fine device that’s less expensive and more accessible to non-techies, we’re still sad to see the Boxee Box relegated to the dust pile.įortunately, Boxee supports the use of 3rd-party app repositories (meaning that you can install outside apps on the Boxee Box), and some hackers figured out how to get the Boxee Box to run custom code from a USB drive. So we’re part lab, part OTT museum at this point.īoxee is instead focusing all its resources on Boxee TV, a device centered around linear TV which has some of the same features as the Boxee Box, but in a much plainer package. Plus, it organizes (DRM-free) video from your networks and USB hard drives with thumbnails and metadata it pulls from the web.Īlas, Boxee discontinued the Boxee Box this fall, making it “televestigial” – joining the ranks of the many devices in the lab that were discontinued or replaced by new hardware. The Boxee Box is a favorite in the lab - its quirky shape never fails to grab the attention of visitors, but the real beauty of the Boxee Box is that it handles virtually every file type we throw at it.
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